NY Post Roasted for Headline About Zohran Mamdani — Not Backed Up by Story

AP Photo/Heather Khalifa

The New York Post sparked a wave of criticism over the weekend and into this week with a Sunday story that made a claim about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani based on the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2021 platform.

The Post’s Gabrielle Fahmy published an “exclusive” report on Sunday titled, “Zohran Mamdani wants to end all misdemeanor charges: ‘E-ZPass for criminals.’”

Fahmy does make clear in her text that the headline actually refers to “Mamdani and his comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America,” a party Mamdani first joined in 2017 and continues to be affiliated with while running as the Democratic Party’s nominee for mayor.

“In its most recent platform, the group blasts policing and detention as ‘instruments of class war’ designed to ‘guarantee the domination of the working class’ — and demands an end what it calls ‘the criminalization of working-class survival,’” wrote Fahmy, linking to the DSA’s website. She added:

“For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state — from prisons and police themselves, to their manifestations in all forms throughout society,” according to the national party’s latest platform, adopted in 2021.

The rest of the article’s headline, the “E-ZPass for criminals,” quote does not come from Mamdani, but instead from his Republican challenger in the race, Curtis Sliwa, who was asked to respond to the DSA platform from over four years ago. “That will create an EZ-Pass for criminals, enabling them to repeatedly commit misdemeanor crimes. This will make the police even less effective at enforcement. Ultimately, this will cause the quality of life to decline dramatically, leading to a breakdown of law and order and resulting in chaos and disorder,” Sliwa told the Post.

Mamdani has come under fire for his past tweets regarding public safety and law enforcement, but has argued during the campaign that his mindset has changed in the past 5 years.

“My statements in 2020 were ones made amidst a frustration that many New Yorkers held at the murder of George Floyd, and the inability to deliver on what Eric Adams of all people described as the right for all of us to be able to enjoy safety and justice, that we need not choose between the two,” Mamdani said in late July, while attending the funeral of a slain police officer.

Mamdani has also made clear he has put out his own platform regarding public safety, one which does not call for defunding the police or ending the enforcement of misdemeanor charges.

“What I am speaking of is a vision that will not only address public safety, but also keep officers in this very police department. Will ensure that they can actually respond to the crimes that are being committed in this city. Because as we’ve seen in the first quarter of this year, we were only able to resolve 35% of all of those crimes that were reported. And part of that is a reflection of asking officers to do nearly every single thing we can think of. And so I’m proud of the public safety platform we’ve put together,” Mamdani said while addressing his critics on the topic.

The New York Post headline, suggesting that Mamdani himself supports ending misdemeanor charges, as opposed to him being associated with a party that had in 2021, sparked strong reactions from both supporters and critics. Mamdani is also running on the Working Families Party ticket in the NYC mayoral race.

The Post story led to reactions on the right like this one from Fox News columnist David Marcus, who shared the story and wrote:

New Democrat platform just dropped:

“The misdemeanors the DSA wants to erase aren’t minor slip-ups. In the Empire State, they include theft or shoplifting up to $1,000, drug possession, assault without a weapon and even driving while intoxicated.”

Critics of the Post story replied with comments like, “This is a fun headline because at no point in this story do they present any evidence that Zohran Mamdani wants to end all misdemeanor charges.”

Below are some additional reactions:

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